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December 9, 2011

Look, it’s not my fault, okay? (It’s totally my fault.) I just realized that they have every single episode of every single Yu-Gi-Oh series on Hulu. What else was I supposed to do? Play good video games? Nap? Enjoy my free time? I mean, come on.

But yeah, I mean, I watched a lot of this show in my youth, more than I care to admit, and going back to it, man, it is way worse than even I remembered. And I remembered it being really quite bad! Even if it is absolutely flawless.

I just can’t get over the voice actors on this show. When fans who aren’t getting paid but are making fun of your show do more acting, put more emotion, and just generally give more of a shit than your voice actors, you have a problem. I mean, so many lines just seem like the people reading them had no direction at all. They didn’t know if there were other characters around, or what they were saying right beforehand, or anything. This is especially true for anyone who is not a main character, who could be reading a grocery list for how much energy they put into their lines. I mean, I get it. This show is STUPID. But the characters think what’s going on is important, and fuck it, you’re getting paid to pretend, you can at least pretend, you know?

In addition, the choices the translators are making are just… what? What? I remember an episode where they replaced Sake and drinking with “Hot Sauce.” That makes sense, even if it’s stupid. Don’t want kids knowing about drinking, I guess. But I recently watched a dumb episode. It was called something like “Curry Worry.” But during the episode itself, they never say curry. They say “pot roast.” What the fuck? That clearly is not a pot roast on the screen! Plus, I mean, kids today very well COULD know what curry is! Or if they don’t, maybe you can expand their pallet a little bit by making them want to try it. It’s not like curry is some vice or something. What the hell?

Finally, the way the game treats its own rules is just really annoying. Sometimes the rule where destroying a creature in defense mode doesn’t deal damage works, but sometimes it doesn’t. I swear a lot of the time the main characters are just pulling extra cards out of nowhere that they don’t have, which is weird, because they do try to cover refilling people’s hands by having them play Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity quite often. At least, unlike in the original Yu-gi-oh, there’s much less of “card has an ability that makes no goddamn sense and would never exist” a la the Catapult Turtle Gambit. They’re just playing cards that very well could exist, but are so situational as to make a normal, sane player of this game never run them. But of course, Yu-Gi-Oh characters can pull whatever card they want out of their deck at will, so those cards then become very powerful. But whatever. At least I could see an actual, physical playing card having that rules text more often than not.

All that said, I watched like 4 and a half hours of it today, and will probably continue to watch it for awhile. I am such a sucker to a world where things are resolved through card games. Even when everything is fucking terrible about it.